He was distressed and depressed. A headache caused him to have problems concentrating and then he complained that he was hearing voices. “Voices?” The family chorused. “We can’t hear anything”
He accused the family of setting up microphones in the house to upset him … it wasn’t long before he agreed to visit a psychiatrist, who suggested hospitalization but his parents were unable to talk about his problem and that upset him deeply. He sensed that they found the whole situation shameful, something that he could not grasp. “I have an illness, he thought. But, a brain illness is not accepted the way other illnesses are, now is it?” In time, the family accepted that this was a physical illness in their son’s brain.
i know that one of the hardest things to accept about my son’s schizophrenia was what we missed out in his life. We did not see him fulfill his dreams. We did not attend a graduation ceremony. We missed hearing about the work he was doing, the people he was meeting, vacations, and we missed the joy of seeing him fall in love, meet the woman of his choice plus the happiness that was bound to follow. Slowly but surely, the son that I knew so well, became a stranger – not even a shadow of his former self.. My son, who had once been an athlete, a tennis player, a surfer and an voracious reader, changed into someone else. He became a haunted, unhappy being.
When Doron went to the hospital for the first time, we thought he would enter sick and exit well, or at least, much better. We wondered whether we might have let him down in some way. We stood by and watched him get sucked up into an abyss, into another world, one previously unknown to us. At one of the darkest points in our lives, I remember flopping down onto the edge of our bed and sobbing uncontrollably. My husband was holding me tightly and neither of us knew what to do. He was repeating; “Hewill get better, you’ll see. He will. He must.”
Then we joined a support group. I remember the feeling of relief after we had introduced ourselves and realized that for the first time ever, all the
The second; PARENTS CANNOT CAUSE SCHIZOPHRENIA .
S C H I Z O P H R E N I A CANNOT BE CAUSED BY ANYTHING PARENTS DO OR DON’T DO.
